Nancy Rommelmann

1940s Paree in 2011 Brooklyn

Last week, with Tavie, taken by my best friend Sarah Knowles, in Bar Tabac

 

Wordstock is Coming

I will be reading (from The Bad Mother), with author Jennifer Lauck, at 5 PM, Sunday, October 9, on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage. (Sounds pretty fancy, huh?) My publisher, Dymaxicon, will have a booth [#705], so I will be around much of the weekend. Ristretto will be there, too, by the Beer Garden. Full list of readers, events, vendors on the Wordstock site.

Speaking of The Bad Mother: As of last week, you will now be buying the second edition, with author blurbs on the cover (thank you Madison Smartt Bell and David Rensin and Erica Schickel and Mark Ebner), as well as a photo of the author.

Cookies

Typing these out for Anya, the fantastic baker known as Miss Zumstein, who was kind enough to lend me a cake recipe when I was baking Heather and Josh's weddding cake, and reprinted here before it disappears forever into the "misc." on my computer. Bonus photo of newly bethrothed moments after saying, "I do," or, in Heather's case, "Hell, yeah."

Din’s Mom’s Pecan Balls

Or what our friend Dario calls, White Balls, as in, "I cannot stop eating these while balls!"

Preheat oven to 300 degrees

1-cup butter (I use salted)

¼ cup sugar

1 T vanilla extract

2 cups flour

2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

Confectioner’s sugar

Cream butter and sugar; add vanilla, then flour, then pecans, just to blend. Form into balls the size of an egg yolk. Baked, near top of oven, for about 45 minutes, until just very lightly tanned. Roll white hot in powdered sugar. These are messy and delicious.

Nancy’s Mom’s Kourabiedes (Greek Butter Cookies)

2 cups unsalted butter

¾ cup powdered sugar, plus more for dusting

1 egg yolk

3 T brandy

4 ½ cups flour, sifted

Whole cloves (optional)

Cream butter. With mixer on lowest speed, add sugar, then egg and brandy, then flour gradually. Chill dough 4 hours, or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Roll dough about the size of walnuts into crescents. Stud each crescent at center, if desired, with whole clove. Bake until the bottoms are just browned. Remove from pans. Dust while warm in powdered sugar.

Both these cookies last weeks when tinned.

 

I Dreamed I Was Old

Though I was the same age I am now. We -- my brother, two friends of ours a little younger, late 30s -- were skiing. We were having a blast, I was skiing fast, cutting nice turns (especially nice considering that in the dream, we were on slopes of scree and sand). We stopped for a break, took off our gear. We were getting ready to get back out when I couldn't find my skis amid the other sets of skis leaning against the outdoor table. I called to my brother, "I can't find my skis." He came over.

"They're right here," he said. They were right in front of me. I said something about their being hidden behind another pair, though they were not, not really. I got them on and skiied to our group, and as I did, saw I had taken one of my poles and one of someone else's, and had only of my gloves (big blue ski gloves I actually own). I saw that the people I was skiing with saw this, too.

"I left a glove," I said, and that I'd catch up with them.

"Could be," said my brother, and off they went, and back I went, where I saw my glove laying under the outdoor table.

I relay this dream not because I think it is interesting to listen to other people's dreams (though actually, I do, especially my daughter's, whose are and have always been of graphic bloody terror). I tell it because I know that this will someday happen. I see it happening with older family members, one in particular. They do not make excuses, as I did in the dream; they sort of laugh it off. But one can sense how the ground beneath their feet is not what it once was. I read that Paul Newman said, a year before his death, that he no longer felt steady, and that "the problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be."

I don't sense the ground beneath my feet becoming precarious, though inevitably, it will, and it won't be the ground that's changed. I swam across the Columbia River last week, 1.1 miles. I loved it so much, I could have swam it again, and two days later, did. Hmm.